Bio

Stewart Brand - Stewart Brand is a co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network, founded and runs the GBN Book Club, and is the president of The Long Now Foundation.

Brand is well known for founding, editing and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (01968-85), which received a National Book Award for the 01972 issue. In 01984, he founded The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 11,000 active users worldwide and is considered a bellwether of the genre.

Brand has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity, since 01989. He received the Golden Gadfly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Media Alliance, San Francisco in the same year.

He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media, and is an acting adviser to Ecotrust, Portland-based preservers of temperate rain forest from Alaska to San Francisco.

Brand is the author of many pioneering books including The Clock Of The Long Now in 01999, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built in 01994, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT in 01987, and Two Cybernetic Frontiers on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science in 01974. It had the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers.

Edmund Wade Davis - Edmund Wade Davis (born December 14, 1953) is a noted Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and photographer whose work has focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, especially in North and South America and particularly involving the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti.

Davis has published popular articles in Outside, National Geographic, Fortune and Conde Nast Traveler.

The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different answers to that question. "We are a wildly imaginative and creative species," declares Wade Davis, and then proves it with his accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the soul of culture, of psyche, and of landscape.

The threat to cultures is often ideological, Davis notes, such as when Mao whispered in the ear of the Dalai Lama that "all religion is poison," set about destroying Tibetan culture.

Is it possible that some people have evolved further away from chimps than others? Are some of us more "human" than others?The Chimp Genome Project, which lists 15 genes associated with human diseases that originate in chimps, has found evidence that some of us have the "new human version" of genes, others still have the "chimp version." UCSF Professor Dr. Katherine Pollard describes this as evidence that we humans are still evolving.

Bio

Katherine Pollard - Katherine received her Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley Division of Biostatistics under the supervision of Mark van der Laan. Her research at Berkeley included developing computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of microarray data with applications in cancer biology.

After graduating, she did a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Sandrine Dudoit. She developed Bioconductor open source software packages for clustering and multiple hypothesis testing. In 2003, she began a comparative genomics NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the labs of David Haussler and Todd Lowe in the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering at UC Santa Cruz.

She was part of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium that published the sequence of the Chimp Genome, and she used this sequence to identify the fastest evolving regions in the human genome. In 2005, she joined the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics. She moved to UCSF in Fall 2008.

We are in the midst of a renaissance in the biological sciences, which is spurring the growth of brand new fields like functional and comparative genomics. These new fields are revealing novel insights into evolutionary biology, medicine, developmental biology and many other areas, transforming the way scientists look at life.

Web Exclusives: Genetics

The three billion letters of DNA in the human genome are more than 98 percent identical to those of a chimpanzee.

What's the difference between you and a chimp? Genetically speaking, virtually nothing.

The tiny genetic difference between us and our nearest animal relatives is responsible for our nimble hands, unique voice boxes and larger brains. Together, these characteristics enable us to speak and understand language, develop music and art, and build skyscrapers, supercomputers, and space shuttles.

To better understand the function of our uniquely human DNA, Katherine Pollard, a biostatistician at the Gladstone Institutes at University of California, San Francisco, wrote a computer program to identify DNA sequences that differ between chimps and us. To pick out the bits of DNA found only in humans, Pollard's program also examined the genetic sequences of the mouse, rat and chicken.

The complete DNA sequence, or genome, of humans is composed of about three billion "letters"â€”the chemical units abbreviated A, T, G or C. The genomes of humans and chimpanzees are about 98.5 percent identical. Still, the difference adds up to more than 30 million letters.

To compare all those letters, and, millions of others from the mouse, rat and chicken genomes, Pollard needed to create an extraordinarily powerful computational tool. She spent months developing, debugging and refining a program that could flip through more than 2,000 DNA letters per second.

Once it was ready, Pollard ran the program on a massive computer cluster at the University of California, Santa Cruz. After just two days, the program generated a ranked list of the DNA sequences that vary the most between humans and chimpanzees.

Katherine Pollard, a biostatistician at the Gladstone Institutes at University of California, San Francisco. Credit: Michael McColl

At the top of the list was a bit of DNA only 118 letters long.

Pollard and her colleague looked up the DNA sequence in a public genomic database and found that it had not been named or actively studied. They also noticed that some experiments indicated that the sequence was active in human brain cells.

"We both yelled 'Awesome!' at the same time," Pollard remembers. They had realized that the tiny piece of DNA might play a key role in the formation of humankind's most treasured traitâ€”our brains.

Pollard named the region HAR1 for Human Accelerated Region 1 because it appears to be a section of DNA that changed rapidly after chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor. Unlike most of our genetic material, the HAR1 sequence differs dramatically from that of chimps.

Pollard and her collaborators strongly suspect that HAR1 is involved in the formation of the wrinkled outermost brain layer called the cerebral cortex. This part of the brain plays a key role in consciousness, thought, language, memory and attention.

As Pollard and her coworkers continue to study HAR1, they learn about other DNA differences between chimps and humans. For example, the second chunk of DNA on her ranked list, dubbed HAR2, seems to be involved in prenatal development of our wrists and thumbs. She and other scientists suspect it could help explain why humans have greater hand dexterity, enabling us to make and use complicated tools.

Pollard has also found human-specific DNA changes in a gene, called FOXP2, that ensures the proper development of brain regions necessary for human speech. Still other gene sequences seem to explain differences in the digestive systems of humans and chimps.

In addition to helping us compare and understand various species, this sort of research may help advance human health. For example, chimps don't get AIDS. If we could figure out what makes them genetically immune to the virus, maybe we could find a way to help vaccinate people against it.

Interestingly, many of the important genetic differences between humans and chimps appear in sections of DNA, like HAR1, that do not code for proteins. Scientists once called these regions "junk DNA." Now the work of Pollard and many others is revealing they may actually be a powerful part of the genome.

Join the California Academy of Sciences to learn about genomics, hear about compelling current research, and explore the future of this rapidly advancing field.

Katherine Pollard received her Ph.D. and M.A. from UC Berkeley Division of Biostatistics under the supervision of Mark van der Laan. Her research at Berkeley included developing computationally intensive statistical methods for analysis of microarray data with applications in cancer biology. After graduating, she did a postdoc at UC Berkeley with Sandrine Dudoit. She developed Bioconductor open source software packages for clustering and multiple hypothesis testing.

In 2003, she began a comparative genomics NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in the labs of David Haussler and Todd Lowe in the Center for Biomolecular Science & Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. She was part of the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium that published the sequence of the Chimp Genome, and she used this sequence to identify the fastest evolving regions in the human genome.

In 2005, she joined the faculty at the UC Davis Genome Center and Department of Statistics. She moved to UCSF in Fall 2008.

The first robot able to show emotions, called Nao, was put through its paces by Guardian science correspondent Alok Jha. Nao has been programmed to mimic the emotional skills of a one-year-old child, learning and interpreting specific cues and responding accordingly.